By: Trey Kenas
Five. Thousand. Athletes. A number so staggering leaving one to even question what the total could possibly represent.
That number stems from the settlement of the House vs. NCAA case, a landmark class-action lawsuit, which involves the NCAA agreeing to pay college athletes nearly $3 billion for the retroactive use of their name, image, and likeness (NIL) rights. This agreement also shifted how teams are structured, moving away from scholarship limits and towards roster limits, which makes those walk-on and partial-scholarship athletes pay the ultimate price: cutting them from the team.
So what does 5,000 represent in totality? It means that 5,000 male and female collegiate athletes, who have spent their entire lives up until this point chasing a dream and an opportunity that could be considered once-in-a-lifetime, will be or already have been asked to step down from attempting to climb the ladder.
Instead, they’ll have to choose either to pursue their dream at another university or be done altogether. Many athletes who have spent the majority of their lives playing their respective sport will now look to redefine themselves as humans as they prematurely move into the next chapter of their lives, while coaches who have lost depth in their roster will look to redefine their programs in order to keep them afloat. This is the story of the death of the walk-on.
Oliver Ehrhardt, a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was a member of the rowing team before being cut, was one of the many athletes impacted by the new roster ruling.
On the flip side, Ehrhardt’s head coach at Wisconsin, Beau Hoopman, is now forced to revamp his program after the NCAA announced it will eliminate his roster by more than half, taking the original 90-man cap and trimming it down to 40.
The implementations of the new NCAA scholarship rules and roster caps are set to be initiated at the start of the 2025-2026 academic year.
In the case of walk-on Oliver Ehrhardt, he faced reality sooner than he would have expected. Ehrhardt got cut from the program in the fall of 2024, which he believes was due to the roster sizes shrinking.
Prior to arriving on campus, Ehrhardt was uncommon in comparison to other rowers on Wisconsin’s men’s rowing team, having come into college with rowing experience at the prep level. Very few, if at most a couple athletes, currently on the roster had rowed at the prep level, which Ehrhardt believed to be a separator in that regard.
The walk-on spent two years at Kent School, a private college preparatory boarding school located in Western Connecticut. However, that added edge proved to be insufficient at the end for Ehrhardt, who was subsequently cut from the roster.
“It was kind of weird”, Ehrhardt shared. “We did one last erg (ergometer) test and then he (Coach Hoopman) brought out the roster board and I wasn’t on it. I first thought to myself: ‘what should I do?’ Rowing has been a part of my life for the last five years and I thought I could do it more competitively at the collegiate level, but unfortunately I couldn’t.”
Ehrhardt initially pondered becoming a manager. But, there was a significant downside: he wouldn’t be able to row at Wisconsin again.
“Being a manager means you can practice with the team and work out with them, but you can’t participate in any races”, Ehrhardt clarified. “On top of that, once you’re a manager, you can’t try out for the team again”, Ehrhardt said.
The program also offers a practice player position, where individuals can stick around and practice with the team. This opportunity acts in unison with the team manager role, prohibiting the athlete from being able to compete in events. However, unlike a manager, a practice player does have the opportunity to try out again the following year and potentially earn themselves a spot.
However, for Ehrhardt, it was time to be done.
The walk-on opted to step away from the program for good, noting it was “definitely sad at first” and “bittersweet.” But, it also signaled a new beginning for Ehrhardt, allowing the walk-on time to begin focusing on other aspects of his life, such as school.
While he doesn’t regret much from his time on the rowing team, Ehrhardt wishes UW Athletics had been more upfront with what was going on.
“I think the biggest thing missing from this experience was transparency”, Ehrhardt said. “Long story short, we didn’t really know what was going on the entire time, and Coach Hoopman told us our fates were in the hands of the UW Athletic Department.
“It felt like Coach Hoopman was the middle man in all of this and knew [some of] what was going on, but not all the details. Regardless it would have been nice to have a representative from the Athletic Department come and talk to us, but that wasn’t the case.”
As Ehrhardt has now been away from the sport for close to eight months, his responsibilities with the rowing program are old news.
That’s the opposite for Beau Hoopman, who understands this is just the beginning of a new journey that entails reshaping and keeping a program competitive that has been around for 150 years.
With that, the two biggest hurdles Hoopman will face with the new changes will be recruiting and funding, with the latter being the more challenging.
“With last year being our 150th as a program, we haven’t needed alumni up until this to help with funding. Since we’ve been riding the Rose Bowl hog, and as a non-profit, athletes weren’t being paid until recently, so you were able to fund your programs”, Hoopman said.
With NIL now in the picture, this is no longer the case.
“Revenue that’s generated by football is going back to football. Revenue that’s generated by basketball is going to basketball. The Olympic sports like us don’t generate revenue for the athletic department, so we’re going to have to figure out what we’re going to do to stay competitive”, Hoopman said.
This is the struggle faced by many programs, such as Hoopman’s, who are digging into the phonebooks, calling up not only notable former alumni, but also general UW-Madison alumni and just general Wisconsinites who are eager and willing to help out the program by any means. Hoopman shared that the initial response from the alumni and general public has been incredibly positive.
“We have a legacy fund that helps to endow the program. We have a goal of $50 million and are currently at $9 million just from last fall. We have a group that’s trying to raise money for NIL and recruiting, and are sitting at a good spot at the moment.”
While the foundation for the financial support has been drawn out and executed thus far, the strategy behind upholding a consistent competitive roster is still a work in progress for Hoopman.
As noted, the head coach lost over 50 roster spots in the House vs. NCAA settlement. Historically, Hoopman and his staff would send out approximately 1,000 letters to kids in Wisconsin and Minnesota to get them to come down to a camp and check out the sport. With the roster size reduction, the coaching staff feels the need to go in a different direction.
“When you have a bigger pool, you have more guys to select from. That is now gone,” Hoopman said. “For the amount of time and resources it takes to cultivate those camps and lists of kids that are novices, the effort you put in for .01% return is not worth the time, especially if the kid ends up joining the team and they suck or they quit.”
Athletes quitting during the season was not always a great worry of Hoopman with the 90-man roster size and his next man up mentality. But, with the roster officially sitting at 40 now, the head coach must find the right athletes and not miss on talent. This presents a tricky situation from multiple facets.
To begin with, the Wisconsin men’s rowing team rarely gets commits from athletes who had rowing experience before coming into college. This is largely attributed to the fact that the rowing team doesn’t offer scholarships, turning away higher prospects to Ivy League and West Coast schools who are able to fit that niche.
“It’s like buying a diamond ring,” Hoopman said about the recruiting process. “These guys (coaches who are able to offer scholarships) just go to the jewelry store. We go to the mine and find a bunch of slag and sift through it and try to find a raw piece of material. And then we compress it into a diamond. That’s what we do.”
Given how Wisconsin had recruited preceding the new roster ruling, this puts Hoopman in a difficult situation. Opportunities to develop rowers over time have, in many ways, fallen out of reach. With the smaller roster size, there is now less margin for error.
“We’re not recruiting guys like Cal does. We get guys that want to be here, but sometimes the guys that want to be here aren’t good enough”, Hoopman acknowledged. “20% of the kids we recruit are worthy varsity athletes. When you limit how many guys you can have in the squad, you have to hit on every guy. That’s the hard part about going down to 40. You can’t miss, because if you miss on a class now, you’re going to be slow for 3 years.”
While the head coach continues to look for ways to sharpen his recruitment, he has also realized that there is practically no margin for error in regard to maintaining your roster. Hoopman can’t afford to lose rowers, as the consequences of not having enough rowers is that you won’t get a shot at the national championship. This, in itself, is Hoopman’s greatest fear.
“If we have four guys quit next year, everybody goes to our national championship, everybody on the roster,” Hoopman shared. “If eight guys quit, we will have a hard time boating three eight’s, and three eight’s is what scores points. If you don’t have three eight’s, the likelihood of you getting invited to the national championship is not good, because they’ll take a team that has three eight’s. That’s what I worry about, being a victim of our own attrition.”
While Hoopman doesn’t necessarily have all the answers at the moment, he knows that if there’s a will, there’s a way. He was a former Wisconsin rower himself who ultimately earned himself a spot on the Olympic team, capturing a gold medal at the 2004 games in Athens.
But, Hoopman wasn’t an elite rower to begin with during his rowing days. He was initially towards the bottom of the roster when he arrived on campus and had to work his way to the top. Creating a habit of resiliency along his way to the top as a rower, Hoopman will now have to lean into it as a coach as the dawn of a new era begins: one filled with great uncertainty, but even greater hope.
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